India’s Celluloid Man

This weekend, cinema enthusiasts will likely flock to “Bombay Talkies,” a tribute to Indian cinema helmed by four leading Bollywood directors. But there’s another celebration of the industry that shouldn’t be missed, and it’s called “Celluloid Man.”

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s National Award-winning film is about Paramesh Krishnan Nair, an 80-year-old film archivist. Mr. Nair founded the National Film Archive of India in 1964. Around 12,000 movies are stored in the archive, which is near the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune.

He is anxious about the archive’s future.

“In our country, film isn’t treated as art. It is considered as a commodity. And for a very long time, the film-industry was looked down upon in the same bracket as prostitution and gambling,” Mr. Nair told India Real Time. “Even today, we don’t have respect for film heritage. It is only a product that is sold to illiterate masses without being given the respect that it deserves,” he said.

Many Indian movies were lost before Mr. Nair founded the NFAI. Mr. Dungarpur’s documentary states only nine silent movies remain out of the 1,700 produced in India before 1931. Of all Indian films made before 1950, roughly 30% remain, it says.

Mr. Nair stopped the rot. Without him, we wouldn’t know “Alam Ara” as the first talking picture and Dadasaheb Phalke wouldn’t be regarded as one of the pioneers of Indian cinema if Mr. Nair – the Celluloid Man - hadn’t salvaged Raja Harishchandra, the first Indian silent film ever made.

Celluloid Man

Poster of ‘Celluloid Man.’

Mr. Nair was born in Kerala in 1933. He loved films from an early age, sneaking out of home at midnight to catch a movie. In 1951 he moved to Bombay, where he eventually got a job as an assistant to Mehboob Khan, who was shooting “Mother India” at the time. In 1961, Mr. Nair left for Pune to join the archives department of the FTII. Three years later, he founded the NFAI.

The documentary Celluloid Man provides a detailed and rare behind-the-scenes look at a bygone era in filmmaking. It also plays out as a labor of love, a tribute to the man who would forget to go home after losing track of time in his obsessive quest to protect reels of film.

“An archivist loses the liberty of choice. Right from Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali to the Wadia brothers’ Hunterwali, each film is worth saving as it could benefit the future generation in ways which we don’t know yet,” Mr. Nair told IRT.

Mr. Nair also spread cinema to far flung corners of south India. With the help of a local translator, Mr. Nair’s touring talkies (movies shown in tents) introduced the likes of “Rashomon” and European movies such as “Bicycle Thieves” to audiences in remote villages.

But Mr. Nair is now worried about the future of the films he preserved. The documentary reveals that the archive hasn’t been well maintained since Mr. Nair’s retirement in 1991. The documentary shows vaults filled with rusty cans and thick cobwebs.

“If we don’t preserve, our future generations will have nothing to look back at, and that will be a sad time for filmmaking,” Mr. Nair says.